We are going to talk about the financial value of slaves in Gor, and I am going to write things that will upset people who have read the first 8-10 novels, because I am going to contradict the statements made by Norman’s characters and his early stories. There, you have been warned. Oh, yes… and I am going to talk about serious issues concerning modern slavery. So if you are sensitive, avoid this article.

“80% of slaves are women, and 80% of them are intended for the sexual pleasure of men.”

This quote from the novels, which I am quoting from memory—I admit I can’t remember which book it’s from—is very important in raising a key point: Gorean slavery clearly has nothing to do with the models of slavery that have existed on Earth in the past.

In fact, and I’m sorry to make my readers cringe, but the concept of Gorean slavery does have an equivalent model… and that is contemporary sexual slavery, which we hypocritically call forced prostitution.

1- Sexual slavery throughout history

While slavery has always existed throughout human history, as has the fight against slavery—we did not invent the struggle for emancipation, it already existed in the Greco-Roman world and even achieved major victories in Rome—sexual slavery, specifically, is in fact very recent.

In the past, slaves were primarily laborers, workers, craftsmen, and sometimes even scholars or warriors! In Rome and Athens, it was highly prized to have slave tutors teach letters, arts, and arithmetic to one’s children. The first fire department in history, in Rome, was made up of slaves, and the most legendary slaves in history are the Mamluks, slave warriors of the Ayyubid Muslim empire, who eventually carved out a kingdom for themselves in Egypt.

In the 20th century, slave laborers slowly disappeared, to be replaced by 1) poor workers with limited rights, but who remain people, not things, from a legal standpoint. And 2) sex slaves, that is, women enslaved and forced into prostitution without any rights, and considered as things and property of their tormentor.

PS: I say women, but I could also say teenage and prepubescent girls and boys, as forced child prostitution affects up to 10 million children worldwide, even if the majority are girls. I told you I was going to touch on sensitive subjects.

I don’t want to rub salt in the wound, but the history of the 20th century (and the beginning of the 21st century) is full of cases of organized and institutionalized sexual slavery, such as that of Korean women by the Japanese army during World War II, or, more recently, that of Yazidi women captured by ISIS and sold to its fighters as sex slaves. And I’m not even talking about the scourge of sexual slavery in China, Thailand, and Mexico today… and I could go on. We don’t know how many people are victims of modern sex slavery (the leading form of forced labor in the world), but estimates put the number at around 25 million victims, with profits of approximately $99 billion per year in 2017.

2- The price of slaves in ancient times

One of the easiest things to find in any civilization with a modicum of accounting is the prices of goods and services. In fact, historians have not had too much trouble, in studying the history of slavery, to find out the prices at which humans were sold and how they varied.

And this is where I’m going to take a dig at Norman, but not too harshly: his knowledge of history was limited to what he learned in middle school, at best high school (and even then), and what he gleaned from movies and TV shows from his era. He didn’t do any research or study the subject at all when he started writing his novels. That said, this was in the 1960s, and historical studies on slavery were still quite rare, especially in the US (they were already much more common in Europe). So, in his first ten to twelve novels, he stuck to the completely far-fetched idea that slaves were worthless.

We will see that this was never the case, and we will take the Roman Empire as an example.

We know very well the price of slaves in the Roman Empire in the 1st century thanks to… Pompeii! Yes, the city engulfed by the ashes of Vesuvius remained a time capsule that even preserved papyrus documents that we are able to decipher, not to mention stone, ceramic, and wooden tablets with price indications, etc. Pompeii has therefore provided the most detailed information, but it is not the only source.

• For example, in 79 AD, a female slave was worth an average of 900 sesterces, while a male slave worker was worth 4050 and a young female slave around 1400.
• In Alexandria (Egypt) at the same time, papyrus scrolls with very detailed lists have been found: a slave woman and her daughter for 3,300 sesterces, an eight-year-old girl (sorry to shock you) for 1,920, an 18-year-old male slave for 1,800, and a literate slave for 3,600.
• We even have, in classical Roman books and epigrams, still around the 1st century AD, prices for slaves with particular features or skills: a slave who was a winemaker was worth up to 8,000 sesterces, a handsome young blond man was also worth 8,000, young girls and boys educated in the pleasures and arts were worth 100,000, and there was even a case of a girl who was claimed to be a virgin and put up for sale, whose sale was a great disappointment: only 800 sesterces.

Yes, but what is a sesterce worth?

To get an idea of its purchasing power, we need to know how much a sesterce would be worth today and how much people were paid at the time. And we know that very well too.

The sesterce is a small bronze coin, but it was sometimes made of silver and later of brass. Roughly speaking, a sesterce would be worth around €2 to €3 in today’s purchasing power, since we know what the Romans could buy in terms of everyday goods. For example, a simple tunic was worth 15 sesterces, a bottle of wine or a kilogram of flour was worth 1 or 2.

Now, we need to consider purchasing power in relation to Roman wages! Around the first century, a laborer or peasant earned 1 sesterce per day, a legionnaire about 2.5 sesterces per day, a small craftsman 10, a merchant between 100 and 500, and a senator earned… 10,000.

The cheapest slave in the examples above is therefore 800 days of a laborer’s work, one year for a legionnaire, or 5 months for a small craftsman. And a senator could buy ten a day and still have money to spare.

Note: during military campaigns, legionnaires could take prisoners who were then enslaved and sold. But it was very rare for a legionnaire to own a slave in this way. It was a gift given to the most deserving… and given the value of a slave, the legionnaire would usually sell it on in order to send a nice sum of money to his family.

But were slaves so rare?

Not at all. At the height of Rome, around the first century AD, the total population of the Roman Empire is estimated at 50 million people, including about 8 to 12 million slaves. There were so many slaves that, during the same period, it is estimated that in the city of Rome and its million inhabitants, almost a third were slaves. Every military campaign, every conquest (and every rebellion quelled) brought its share of captives, and therefore new slaves to the market. Thus, at the end of the Gallic Wars, more than a million enslaved Gauls were put up for sale in Roman markets (yes, this insane figure makes my head spin too). The Romans also did not hesitate to sell some of their children to pay off debts or escape poverty (or to get rid of them because they were unwanted), not to mention that enslavement for debt was also completely legal.

To sum up, we are talking about an average (this varied depending on the period in Roman history) of 15 to 20% of the population of the Roman Empire being enslaved.

But slaves were expensive. To compare with today, they would have been as useful in terms of labor power as agricultural and construction machinery or computerized management and accounting systems with their dedicated servers, equipment that ordinary citizens were unlikely to own. Most slaves were rural and worked on the huge plantations of the wealthiest landowners (who were often senators) or as public slaves, belonging to the city’s public services (and therefore to the emperor) and responsible for urban road works, administration, and public buildings, not to mention the unlucky among them, the slaves in the quarries and mines (who were slaves considered too recalcitrant or rebellious to be used for anything else).

Slaves in Rome: some differences and peculiarities

Not only were Roman slaves, although numerous and readily available, expensive, but they also had certain rights, such as the right to marry, have children, educate them (if they could afford it or if their master was generous), and own slaves themselves (given to them by their master or purchased). and very often received the peculium (which is where the French word “pécule” – savings-  comes from), i.e., a kind of small salary, which, even though it legally belonged to the master, like everything else given to the slave, could be used for whatever expenses the slave wished, including buying back his freedom!

Another important poin t—the last one— which I will come back to, is that the vast majority of slaves in the Roman Empire were neither broken nor trained. It was also forbidden, under penalty of prosecution, to inflict physical abuse deemed unnecessary or degrading (even though certain horrors were permitted, such as branding with a hot iron—including on the forehead—or judicial mutilation—usually of a finger or the nose). It was forbidden to resell a slave who was too old or worn out to be of any use, or to separate parents and young children. A slave in Rome was told the rules and shown —if he did not already know— the punishment reserved for slaves who attacked a free person or attempted to rebel or flee (they were usually crucified and left to die on the sides of roads), and that was all.

Were there abuses and perversions of slavery comparable to or worse than those described in Gor’s novels? Yes, of course. We have sources on the sexual enslavement of children, on cruel games leading to the madness or death of slaves for the pleasure of their masters, or on slaves living miserable lives at the hands of inhuman owners. But not only is this more of a rare anecdote than a general rule, but what’s more, even the wealthiest Romans did not appreciate this kind of abuse, which was often punished by social ostracism or even criminal proceedings (or by a good old-fashioned murder, which the Romans were fond of).

The slavery of Gor that Norman describes at length in his novels never existed as such anywhere in the world or in history, except …

… in contemporary sexual slavery — including methods for breaking and training victims— and in the wildest and harsh  BDSM bondage fantasies.

3- The price of slaves in the world of Gor

I’ll start by pointing out the obvious: in the novels, the monetary systems Norman describes are completely inconsistent. Don’t believe me? Here are a few examples:

“Give me, then,” she said, “a piece of tarsk, a tenth of a copper tarsk.

Gor’s Fighting Slave Book 14 Page 300

The current ratios in the vicinity of Brundisium at the time of writing, taking into account the inflation of unstable times, are one hundred tarsk bits to one copper tarsk.

Gor’s Price Book 27 Page 488

“One hundred copper tarsk make one silver tarsk.”

Explorers of Gor Book 13 Page 54

“The tarsk is a silver coin worth forty copper tarsk.”

Assassin of Gor Book 5 Page 160

“Similarly, something like ten silver tarsks would apparently be equivalent, depending on weights, etc., to a gold coin, say a single tarn.”

Mages of Gor Book 25 Page 469

For the common silver tarsk, the smallest tarsk, the coin corresponding to the auction in question, the ratio was one hundred such tarsks to one gold tarn.

Prices of Gor Book 27 Page 488

In the Gor novels, a vulo (a kind of edible pigeon) is worth one copper coin, but elsewhere in the same novel it is worth 10, without any mention of whether this is because they are not the same coins, or because the product is not as rare, etc. Not to mention that, according to this concept, a slave would be worth the same price as five or six vulos? Whereas it is clearly described that slaves are a rare commodity that requires a significant investment in training, education, and maintenance before even considering selling them on the market.

The only consistent thing that can be said about the price of slaves in Norman’s work is that it is inconsistent. There is no logical standard: a beautiful Earth woman like Judy Thornton, in Slave-girl of Gor, is sold for 21 copper tarsk (what, the price of 21 bowls of paga?!). Most pleasure slaves are estimated to be worth at least one gold tarn in Assassins of Gor, but only a few silver tarsk in Fighting Slave of Gor. Then we learn that a pleasure kajiru can be worth 1,000 gold tarn in Magicians of Gor, and, finally, that there are no more than four or five thousand Earth slaves on Gor (Beasts of Gor), but that selling one for more than one silver tarsk is strange (Savages of Gor) when Earth slaves are highly prized (Assassins of Gor). Oh yes, and did I mention that on average no more than 3% to 4% of the population of Gor is enslaved, and that owning a slave is a luxury (kajira of Gor), but that there are so many female slaves on the markets that they are worthless (slave-girl of Gor)?

How many slaves are there in the world of Gor?

If we take a general average, just over 3 to 4% of the total population of Gor is enslaved, or 20 million people out of approximately half a billion Goreans. And to dispel yet another myth, Earth women are extremely rare: fewer than 5,000 in all of Gor! Yes, the Goreans who kidnap people from Earth only capture a few Earth girls at a time, so they are extremely rare!

Of course, this is an average: in large Gor cities, the proportion of enslaved people can rise to 10%. 80% of enslaved people on Gor are women and, for example, in Ar, Norman tells us that 20% of the women in the city are slaves.

A slave is expensive to train in the world of Gor

Due to the very nature of the enslavement of women in the world of Gor, and the techniques used to break and train a captive to become a totally animalized slave, submissive and devoid of any personal ambition (I won’t give you another lecture on the training of Gor slaves, you can find a guide here: https://www.psychee.org/gorpedia/slave-training-education-2/ ), a slave represents an investment from the outset.

We are not dealing with Roman-style enslavement, which generally boiled down to: “Here are the rules, here’s what happens if you don’t obey, now get to work.” In the world of Gor, enslavement is literally an art and a craft. Properly enslaving and training a slave takes at least one or two months of hard work. Turning her into a competent pleasure slave takes at least a year, often two or three.

And it’s expensive! So not only is the raw material rare (20 million slaves out of half a billion Gorans), but it also requires considerable expense, time, and investment in terms of training and care, usually by qualified professionals.

A copper coin is the price of a vulo

A loaf of bread in the world of Gor can be bought for one tarsk bit, and a glass of paga in a tavern, including the sexual services of a kajira, can be bought for one copper tarsk. Well, a kilo of basic bread in France is worth an average of €2, right? A loaf of bread is just one serving for one person, so €1? Why not! That gives us a bowl of paga in an inn for €10, which doesn’t seem absurd. Similarly, a cooked vulo costs about 1 copper tarsk, so €10 as well? Quite consistent. Meat was never as rare as we think it was in Roman antiquity or the Middle Ages, it was just more expensive than it is today. A vulo is smaller than a chicken (it’s actually a large pigeon). And a live vulo should cost little more than 2 or 3 copper tarsk.

Nearly 90% of Goreans are commoners: peasants, laborers, warehouse workers, or small craftsmen. They earn no more than 100 copper tarsk per year, if we take the references from the novels and try to standardize them with the various prices we can glean here and there. They never see a silver coin, which is roughly the price of a tarsk on the hoof (the pig of Gor). You have to be at least a craftsman or merchant, i.e., among the richest 10% of Goreans, to earn between 2 and 20 silver tarsk per year. As for the richest, who earn more than 20 silver tarsk per year, they make up 1% of the population and can earn up to a hundred silver coins per year, then there are the rare families (rulers, ubars, great merchants) who count their fortunes in tens or hundreds of gold coins.

So a slave, who is a rare commodity in the world of Gor, broken, trained, and educated even to the bare minimum, which required several weeks of work, can hardly be worth a handful of 4 or 5 copper coins. Even if she is newly captured and not yet broken, her potential value and rarity make her a commodity on which a good merchant can make a large profit. Only a desperate fool would sell a slave at that price.

I would like to point out, as Norman himself insists on the subject, that owning a slave in the world of Gor is not only every man’s dream, but also a source of prestige, a symbol of success and social ease. All the conditions are in place to realize that slaves in Gor are expensive. The ridiculously low price of slaves in the early Gor novels is simply the result of a somewhat delusional error on Norman’s part, which he corrected in his later novels. From volume 12 or 15 onwards, slaves are no longer worth a handful of copper coins, but rather silver coins.

So how much do they cost?

It is in the very first Gor novel that we find the best reference to a more or less consistent price for, let’s say, a properly trained slave:

“A gold tarn was a small fortune. It could buy one of the great birds themselves, or up to five (pleasure) slaves.”

Tarnsman of Gor

Let’s take that as our starting point. In the Gor monetary system I am using here, based on the meter currency ZcS, the average price of a well-trained pleasure slave with a minimum of education is about 20 silver tarsk, which is a considerable sum that no soldier or laborer could ever earn with his salary. Using the decimal system of Gorean currency, this is equivalent to 2 silver tarsk. Since Norman describes at least two monetary systems, one of which is decimal, this works.

The prices quoted are those of slaves sold at auction, with their base price. Slave prices can reach astronomical sums. The highest price mentioned in the novels is 1,000 gold tarn, but prices of 5, 10, or 20 gold tarn for pleasure kajirae are not even exceptional.

• Tarsk bit: B (bit)
• Copper tarsk: C (copper)
• Silver tarsk: S (silver)
• Gold tarn: G (gold)

• Barbarian (non-Earthling) without training: 2 S
• Breeding slave with pedigree (passion slave): 40 S
• Combat slave: 35 S
• Exotic: 1 G
• Panther woman: 25 S
• Coin girl: 5 S
• Kettle girl: 5 S
• Farm girl: 3 S
• High-caste daughter: 50 S
• Ubar’s daughter: 5 G
• Force slave: 4 S
• High slave: 1 G
• Kajira of pleasure: 20 S
• Kajiru (male) of pleasure: 30 S
• Tower Kajira: 15 S
• Earthling: 25 S